Adding ‘hated’ items to the list this week, because once in awhile I’d just like to throttle the general population at large. No offense if you’re part of it.

With that said, annoyances this week:

People that don’t know how to use email.Learn to communicate properly via written word, please. Your top posting is wasting the time of everyone who reads from the top of the page to the bottom (99.9% of the US population) and shows that you never bothered to outgrow your newbie habits.

Quoting should be used for quoting a line you’re about to reply to, not for re-documenting yet another full copy of the email in the thread, and all 20 replies back in the message. Use a standard ‘>’ or ‘ | ’ to indicate a quote. Don’t use initials - that’s disgusting, and not easily parsable for mail clients that visually separate quotes by color.

MS: Here’s an example of someone incorrectly thinking
MS: that their quoting style is spiffy and unique!

Email is a communication medium. Why needlessly make it so difficult for others to do so? Quit being so lazy.

SpamCop.Recent blacklisting policies just further demonstrate that SpamCop has no real concept of how smtp works. If you’re using them to filter your email, there is a good chance you’re missing mail from valid senders. RFC lines that use the word “MUST” aren’t ‘recommendations’. People that follow RFC on envelope-sender bounces aren’t automatically spammers. Wake up.

The spelling of the word “Lose”.I make spelling errors quite a bit -- but there is something about ‘lose’ that nails everyone - from 12 year olds, to English professors. “I’m loosing interest, you looser!”

It kills me. KILLS.

Ok, onto the good stuff:

Faith No MoreCame up randomly on the ipod early this week. Whisked me back into 8th grade. “Zombie Eaters” is fantastic. I had forgotten.

Perl regexp debuggingI always forget this pragma exists. Having a problem with a regexp not doing what you think it should? Add to your script:

use re ‘debugcolor’;

Bad ass.

Good text formattersPar is great for cleaning up the poorly formatted mail of others (read up), as well as your own. In particular, “par w72qrg” is quite delicious.

Perltidy. Add “-nola -sbl” to your .perltidyrc, rock and roll. (It still does a couple of silly things, but in general, I can just dump a bunch of code out of my brain without regard for “looks”, and it is auto-magically transformed.)

Even better, vim key bind both par and perltidy, and I’m in text formatting heaven.